The very rapid growth that our products have seen lately is indicative of the need to look beyond any single tool in the evolving ALM stack, and consider the flow of information between the people that define the disciplines of the software lifecycle. Tasktop got to where we are today by placing a manic focus on the needs of the individual software developer, who was getting completely overloaded with the disconnected morass of ALM tools that failed to connect to the source code that defines delivery. That forced us to create a new model of social tasks that emphasized autonomy, transparency and integration across the increasingly diverse tool chain. With Tasktop Sync, our Task Federation has migrated from supporting Agile delivery on the developer’s desktop to connecting the rest of the software lifecycle in order to bring about a “Lean ALM”.

Driving a change in the way that software is built takes like-minded people filled with passion and purpose. Dave’s mission is to help people build software just a little bit better, and with our shared values, we expect that goal to materialize very quickly. In his role as an analyst, Dave has heard the software delivery needs and gaps of countless software organizations that build the products and services that we all rely on day-to-day. In his role as Chief Product Officer, responsible for transforming that need into our product vision and roadmap, you can expect Dave to accelerate our pace of customer-centric innovation even further as we work with our partners and open source community to connect the software lifecycle.

Read more in Dave’s post and Neelan’s post.

Some have objected to my statement that Linus Torvalds’ bigger contribution to our planet is going to be Git, not Linux. Yes, Linux is everywhere. But Linux was a creative imitation, whereas I was focusing on the true innovations that are moving us towards the social code graph, and that’s precisely where Git fits in. Also, early in the talk I mention that Eclipse has gone from 1.5M to 2.5M downloads between January 2011 and January 2012. That’s monthly downloads, and with Vietnam surpassing Germany, a clear sign of the times.

Watch the keynote here, and I look forward to hearing your feedback and ideas.

2012 marks the start of the second decade of Eclipse’s existence. I’ve been a committer on Eclipse for the past decade and have watched as an IBM initiative created a platform that now dominates the tooling space for professional developers outside working outside the VS/.NET stack. The leadership and innovation of Eclipse have created the modern pluggable IDE, innovated the code editing and navigation experience, fostered modern modeling technologies, and led the way in connecting the developer to the Agile, ALM and social coding movements. With the recent announcement of the VS 11 beta we’re reminded again that innovation can be cyclical. The first release of Eclipse from a dacade ago, visible above with its monochrome UI and toolbars, looks strikingly similar to latest version of VS 11 just announced (image from the Visual Studio blog).

While the strength of Microsoft is packaging a seamless end-to-end developer experience on a monolithic stack, the strength of Eclipse comes from the innovation driven by the large number of vendors leveraging Eclipse for gluing together the developer experience on heterogeneous stacks. For this next year of Eclipse’s evolution, both adapting the way that we build that tool stack in the social coding context, and improving ways to support our ecosystem of both community and vendor contributions, will be my priority if elected.

See my full vision statement on the Eclipse Board Elections page.

Our journey and passion have been fueled by our customers and our open source community, as to date we have not taken any external funding, and instead embarked on what’s more recently been defined as the Lean Startup approach to building a company in an Agile and customer-centric fashion. Bootstrapping, we have doubled in revenue and nearly doubled in head count each year since our inception, and now support over a thousand customers and over a million open source users. Working closely with our ISV partners, the Eclipse community and open source ALM projects, we are proud to be one of the key contributors defining the future of ALM.

In addition to the opportunity to be a part of a transformative endeavor, what’s guided our vision is a manic focus on the needs of individual software workers. Mylyn and its commercial counterpart, Tasktop Dev, materialized because the growth in complexity of software and the fragmentation of ALM tools were bringing our and our fellow developers’ productivity to a halt. Tasktop Sync was born out of the same need to give other stakeholders such as testers, project managers and business analysts, a connected and collaborative view on the software delivery process. With our focus on integration, our goal is to empower developers and other stakeholders in order to advance ALM to support the rise of the software-powered economy.

We want to take this birthday moment to thank all of the customers and partners who have made it possible for us to do what we love, which is to invent the future of ALM and to strive for our goal of doubling the productivity of software developers and managers. We hope you like the next round of innovations that we are hard at work for launching in 2012, which will be a definitive year for software, for ALM and for Tasktop Technologies.

Ten years ago, I got involved with Eclipse as one of the first non-IBM committers, which has given me perspective on the way Eclipse first disrupted and then evolved along with the application development landscape. By way of efforts like EGit, Hudson/Jenkins, Tycho, and the umbrella of Mylyn projects, Eclipse has since become the leading driver of innovation in moving the developer to the center of the ALM picture. Other IDEs and development platforms are now starting to emulate the dev-centric ALM transformation that Eclipse started five years ago. From this transformation, a new set of open source frameworks were created and now broadly adopted. As a result, the ALM projects on Eclipse have come to lead the connection between the developer and the Agile plan, deployment destination, operations team, requirements, and quality management.

At the Agile ALM Connect conference we will be charting the course for the role of the developer in ALM, while connecting the organization to the new breed of open source, Agile and devops technologies. Unlike conferences focused on methodologies, we are interested in the full spectrum of approaches, ranging from tools and automation to people and practices. If you have ideas to share on how the landscape of Agile, ALM, and application development should evolve over the next decade, consider joining the conversation.

For submissions and information see the Agile ALM Connect Conference homepage

Many of you have been asking when Code2Cloud (or as some knew it, Cloud Foundry Code) is going to be made publicly available. Today we are announcing a key milestone on this longer-than-expected journey. Tasktop has now been tasked by VMware to bring Code2Cloud to the open source community. Tasktop’s services division has been the delivery partner for the project and Tasktop will continue to maintain and evolve Code2Cloud for the early adopters of the closed beta. Although we haven’t yet determined the specifics of how, when, and where Code2Cloud will be made available in open source, or for that matter the name of the project when it is open sourced, we are committed to making the project available in Q1 of 2012. Code2Cloud will be available via a community and commercial-friendly open source license (either Eclipse Public License v1.0 or Apache License v2.0).

We are announcing this change in the project structure because as with Eclipse Mylyn, we see a successful Code2Cloud as being built on an open and inviting charter for both individual and commercial contributors wanting to leverage the Code2Cloud frameworks and tools. We will work with our existing partners and community over the coming month to define a structure and charter for the project. We encourage any interested parties to contact us at partners@tasktop.com. We believe there are tremendous opportunities for ALM vendors to participate in and leverage Code2Cloud as an on-ramp to their initiatives and to get a step ahead in the move of the deployment destination to the cloud.

Over the past year, Code2Cloud has grown to become a developer-centric integration platform architected to connect developers to PaaS deployment destinations by way of the ALM stack. It supports CloudFoundry and builds on existing tools such as Hudson/Jenkins, Git and GitHub. It also provides a Bugzilla-compatible but cloud-centric issue tracker intended to connect the running application, CI and SCM tools to the developer’s desktop, and unifies services such as authentication via OAuth. A key opportunity that we see now is in making Code2Cloud even more agnostic of the ALM stack and in delivering its integration and Cloud deployment support to the wide variety of open source and commercial ALM tools available today.

If you have ideas or questions on bringing Code2Cloud to open source please post here. If you want to get involved in discussing the structure of the open source project please email partners@tasktop.com. For more see: http://tasktop.com/c2c

James Governor (RedMonk founder and Principal Analyst) and I discussed the release and walked through some of the key features:

Here are a few highlights from the Tasktop 2.1 New & Noteworthy:

HP ALM & Quality Center 11 on Mac, Linux and 64-bit Windows
HP ALM Requirements, Defects and Tests can now be retrieved on Mac, Linux and 64-bit Windows machines using the REST connection provided by ALM 11 instead of the native connection. This feature is only supported when connecting to ALM 11 Patch 2 or higher.

HP ALM & Quality Center Tests
You can now bring HP ALM Tests into your Task List along side your HP ALM Defects and Requirements.

Tasktop for VS: Ability to View Task Associations
The Visual Studio task editor now displays task associations, making it easy to see the parent and child relationships and external dependencies inside Visual Studio. Double-clicking an associated task opens it in the task editor, allowing you to quickly access its content.

Planner Story Board and Kanban
The planning tools now support Kanban for compatible ALM tools, and includes a story board and WIP limits. The release planner now supports grouping stories and tasks by activity or assignee, allowing you to organize your planning around these high level concepts.

Focus plan on My Tasks
The task board and story board now include a “Focus on My Tasks” button which shows you only the tasks or stories that are assigned to you.

Download the free trial

Tasktop Sync moves our existing Task Federation(tm) technology from a developer’s desktop client to the server. Developers’ need for Task Federation arose from the fact that in larger organizations, development tasks span multiple systems, from requirements definitions to defects, from issues to change sets and from tests to builds. But tasks not only span systems, they also span stakeholders. If a tester needs to email a developer to get clarification on a fix, or to email a business analyst for details on a requirement related to testing, the ALM stack is broken. With application complexity continually rising, it is no longer feasible to effectively collaborate and report over disconnected chains of email. Just as Tasktop, Mylyn and the task-focused interface have been instrumental at starting to bring about the end of email between developers, today we are embarking on connecting the other members of the software lifecycle. The difference is that unlike developers, most other stakeholders do not live in an IDE-type rich client capable of bringing the many disparate forms of software project information together. Their window on the software delivery process is the web browser. To support them, we needed to integrate directly with the data models of the tools that they use.

Tasktop Sync is the first real-time synchronizer for ALM. While synchronization is largely solved for email and contacts, with protocols and synchronizers working seamlessly across Microsoft Exchange, IMAP, Google Apps and iOS, the lack of a scalable and generic solution has been an endemic problem in large-scale ALM. With Tasktop Sync, the ALM architect simply sets up a mapping between the various ALM systems of record for requirements, Agile, development and testing. For example, the mapping may specify that defects should be one-to-one mapped between the Agile tracker and the defect tracker. Once Tasktop sync has built up its cache, every change in the test system is propagated instantly to the agile tool, and back again, ensuring that all stakeholders can work in their system of choice. We have built on the Mylyn frameworks, Tasktop Certified ecosystem of connectors, and our deep partnerships with the leading Agile and ALM vendors to create this entirely new level of ALM interoperability.

If you are involved in an Agile rollout or ALM modernization effort that is struggling with disconnected tools and increasing presence of open source in the stack, Tasktop Sync will provide you with the integration that you need for all stakeholders to collaborate with context in their tool of choice.

Learn more, view data sheet, get Sync

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